There are several notable December dates in my family, including birthdays, an engagement, and deaths. Time permitting, I’ll try to get all of them posted this month. This December 17, my dad, Kenneth Bly, would have been 90 years old.

Dad was a Missouri native, born in Kansas City and a graduate of the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. He met my mother while he was working in Detroit, and they lived in several Midwestern states.

Dad had a curious mind and loved to discover how things worked. One of his childhood experiments involved setting his mother’s silverware end to end to have it act as a conductor while it was attached to the front doorbell–its success was measured by the shock one of the neighborhood girls got when pressing the doorbell. He would be so taken with the today’s technology–he’d have loved the internet, iPhones, digital cameras, and GPS systems; and I think he would have been tickled to find himself featured on a blog.